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Terms Of (Ab)Use

One cannot go online today without eventually being asked to accept a set of so-called Terms of Service (or TOS). These "terms" are actually purported legal contracts between the user and the online service provider (websites MMORPGs communication services etc.) despite the fact that users never get a chance to negotiate their contents and can often be entirely unaware of their existence.

Using a TOS online service providers can dictate their legal relationship with users through private contracts rather than rely on the law as written. In the unregulated and unpredictable world of the Internet such arrangements often provide the necessary ground rules for how various online services should be used.

Yet TOS agreements also raise a number of concerns for the consumer as they can be a vehicle for abuse by online service providers. For starters TOS provisions are usually written by the service providers themselves. As a result they tend to end up being one-sided in the service provider's favor and are often designed to be beyond any judicial scrutiny. Even more importantly most users never even bother to read let alone understand these agreements filled as they are with confusing legalese.

The time has come to shed light on what these Terms of Service agreements actually say and what it means to users. In conjunction with our TOSBack project EFF is working to make the contents of these TOS more transparent for the average user.

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At issue in this case was whether three software programmers who created the BnetD game server -- which interoperates with Blizzard video games online -- were in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Blizzard Games' end user license agreement (EULA).

EFF and a coalition of academics and public policy groups are urging a federal judge to dismiss a criminal indictment that could give websites extraordinary power to dictate what behavior becomes a computer crime.

The defendant Lori Drew was charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) by using a fictitious name and age on a MySpace account and using that account to make hurtful comments to a teenage girl. Tragically the girl later took her own life.

EFF has urged a San Francisco federal court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss Facebook's claims that criminal law is violated when its users opt for an add-on service that helps them aggregate their information from a variety of social networking sites.

EFF held Sony BMG accountable for infecting its customers' computers with software that created grave security vulnerabilities and let the company spy on listening behavior.

Sony BMG included the dangerous software on millions of music CDs as part of a misguided attempt to restrict consumer usage. After pushing Sony BMG to take the CDs off the market, EFF filed and subsequently settled a class-action lawsuit that forced Sony to repair the damage already done. EFF also successfully pressured Sunncomm, the creators of one of the harmful technologies, to fix the security flaws.